Question of the Day

Whose side of the story do you believe?

“My truth is that I am a gay American,” announced Gov. James McGreevey to the people of New Jersey last Thursday.

That’s such an exquisitely contemporary formulation: “my” truth. Once upon a time, there was only “the” truth. Now everyone gets his own — or, as the governor put it, “one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world.” For Jim McGreevey, his truth is that he’s a homosexual, a “gay American”; for others in the Garden State, the truth about Mr. McGreevey is he’s a corrupt sexual harasser who put his lover on the state payroll in a critical homeland security post, and whose I-am-what-I-am confessional is a tactical feint to distract media sob sisters from the fact, as his final service to the Democratic Party, he resigned in a way that denies the people an early vote on his successor.

We’ll see whose truth prevails in the fullness of time.

In politics, it’s helpful if whatever “unique truth” the consultants have run past the focus groups bears at least a passing relationship to the real, actual truth — not the whole truth, but at least a grain of it. That was what was so ingenious about Bill Clinton’s “60 Minutes” appearance in 1992. He didn’t come clean — he was, as usual, full of it — but he set in motion his designated “unique truth” — flawed but human. It was designed to get him past Gennifer, but it wound up also getting him past Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita. … Whatever goods you got on him, it fit “his truth” as he sold it to us on CBS that day. As his attorney Cheryl Mills put it during the impeachment trial, Bill Clinton, along with Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, “made human errors, but they struggled to do humanity good.”

That brings us to John Kerry. What is his unique truth? In 1986, on the floor of the United States Senate, he said:

“I remember Christmas of 1968, sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there, the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory, which is seared — seared — in me.”

Though the seared senator peddled this searing memory for a quarter-century, it had evidently been seared into him pretty haphazardly. It turns out at Christmas 1968 he wasn’t in Cambodia but was instead 55 miles away at Sa Dec, South Vietnam. So the Kerry campaign’s begun riffling hurriedly through its Sears Rowback catalog for a more or less watertight back-pedaling of the story: They now say “many times he was on or near the Cambodian border,” which is true in the sense 80 percent of Canadians live on or near the American border. But most folks in Vancouver don’t claim to be living in the Greater Seattle area.

Earlier, senior Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan told ABC News: “The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol … in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam.”

For a crowd of ostentatious multilateralists, they can’t seem to hold the map the right way up: The Mekong River isn’t the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; it cuts through the heart of Cambodia and then runs through Vietnam to the sea.

But this question isn’t about geographical degrees of latitude so much as psychological ones. Here’s the real reason Lt. Kerry wasn’t spending Dec. 24, 1968, on a secret mission in Cambodia: On the previous day, Dec. 23, the U.S. government finally secured the release, after a five-month diplomatic standoff, of 11 Americans whose U.S. Army utility landing craft had made a navigational error and strayed into Cambodian waters. Prince Sihanouk had rejected U.S. apologies and threatened to try the men under Cambodian law. It’s unlikely, 24 hours after their release, anyone in Washington was thinking, “Hey, we need to send that hotshot Kerry in there.”

So what are we to make of Mr. Kerry’s self-seared 30-year-old false memory of Christmas in Cambodia with its vast accumulation of precise details? Of being shot at by the Khmer Rouge (unlikely in 1968) and of South Vietnamese troops drunkenly celebrating Christmas (as only devout Buddhists do)?

It’s not about dates and places. For Mr. Kerry, his Yuletide mission was an epiphany: the moment when he realized his government was lying about what was going on. This is the turning point, the moment that set the young Lt. Kerry on the path from brave young war volunteer to fierce antiwar activist. And it turns out it’s total bunk.

Thirty-five years on, having no appealing campaign themes, the senator decides to run for president on his biography. But for the last 20 years he has been a legislative nonentity. Before that, he was accusing his brave band of brothers of mutilation, rape and torture. He spent his early life at Swiss finishing school and his later life living off his wife’s inheritance from her first husband. So, biograpically, that leaves four months in Vietnam, which he talks about nonstop.

That 1986 Senate speech is typical: It was supposed to be about Reagan policy in Central America, but like so many Kerry speeches and interviews somehow it winds up with yet another self-aggrandizing trip down memory lane.

A handful of Mr. Kerry’s “band of brothers” are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow Swift boat commanders and 254 Swiftees from Mr. Kerry’s Coastal Squadron One, oppose his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don’t think there’s a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work. To put in terms they can understand, imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the stockholders declared him unfit for office. More to the point, on the Swiftvets’ first major allegation — Christmas in Cambodia — the Kerry campaign has caved.

Who is John Kerry? What is his “unique truth”? Consider this vignette from New Hampshire primary season as retailed in a recent 8,000-word yawneroo puff piece in the New Yorker:

” ‘He’ll often thrash around in the night,’ the filmmaker George Butler, one of Kerry’s oldest friends, told me. ‘He smashed up a lamp in my house in New Hampshire, in the bedroom where he was staying. Most Vietnam veterans go through this.’ ”

Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain’s Telegraph Group, North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.